Control arms

Now I’ve got your attention, I wanted to be vaguely serious for a second.

Some of you may have recently seen the film Lord of War. To be honest, it’s not a brilliant film. To anyone who knows anything about the issues, it’s a bit like being hit over the head with a huge didactic hammer that says ‘arms traders are bad’. That being said, however, it is a pretty good introduction to an issue that is, for want of a better expression, deadly serious.

Many of you will know that I recently left an organisation where I spent three and a half years working on the issue of arms control. Many of you will also know that I had various doubts and frustrations about what I was doing. However, a lot of what the organisation was doing is extremely important (I just wasn’t doing that stuff!). None more so than its behind-the-scenes involvement in the Control Arms Campaign, which is primarily run by Amnesty International, Oxfam and IANSA (the International Action Network on Small Arms). The slogan for this campaign is not that guns are bad per se, but that ‘the arms trade is out of control.’ To anyone who looks into this issue at all, this statement is so true it’s scary. The arms trade is largely unregulated by international law (and national legislation is jam-packed full of loopholes), vastly corrupt, and though it supposedly follows the laws of supply and demand, the market feeds off massive state protectionism, lots of blind-eye-turning, and huge over-capacity, meaning lots of weapons are produced and sold that nobody – least of all the peoples of many of the states that buy them – need.

Now I’m not asking you all to suddenly give up your day jobs and join the movement. However, the Control Arms Campaign is pushing hard for international negotiations to begin this year on the adoption of an International Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). As part of this campaign, they hope to complete one of the biggest ever petitions – the Million Faces Campaign. If they get their million faces from around the world, these pictures will be presented to the world’s diplomats at a big UN meeting in the summer, where it is hoped that the UN will adopt a resolution to begin negotiations on the ATT. They've got 900,000 already, so they're not far off now. So, if you haven’t twigged what I’m asking yet – have a look on the Control Arms website, and if you’re convinced, get a photo of you, and preferably all your friends, and upload it to their site.